Do scientists exaggerate the impact of an meteor or asteroid hitting the earth?

Question

We hear it everyday - fearmongers stating that if an asteroid hit the earth it would kill all if not most life on the planet. In all seriousness - would a 1 mile wide asteroid or meteor really have that much of an impact striking our 8000+ mile diameter planet?

And... did an asteroid or meteor really wipe out dinosaurs?

And please show me the answer with some physics "numbers"? i.e. the impulse at impact on a body 512 billion times bigger than it.

I want to make it clear that the earth has a volume 512 billion times that of a 1 mile diameter asteroid.

Answer 1

No...

All calculations are based off of an impact explosion model developed for determining the effect of Bunker Buster artillery.

That type of impact would be no diferent than what was seen when battleships lobbed volkswagen sized shells into the earth... Only the size and velocity of the projectile are increased to reflect the meteor...

Answer 2

Scientists don't exaggerate it but the media does. And people on Yahoo! Answers frequently do. A 1 mile wide asteroid would not cause that much damage to the planet, but it might throw enough dust and steam into the air to severely change the climate for years to come, causing a "nuclear winter". However, the whole nuclear winter idea is just a theory, not a known fact, and we don't know for sure how big an asteroid would be needed to cause it.

About your additional details, there is pretty good evidence that a giant meteor killed the dinosaurs. An asteroid about 6 miles in diameter hit and make a crater over 100 miles in diameter, throwing dust and steam into the air and causing worldwide darkness due to thick cloud cover that lasted for years. All the plants died for lack of light and the dinosaurs starved. So it is not the physical damage to the rocky structure of the Earth, which is limited to a crater being created; it is the weather disruption that kills.

Answer 3

I can answer your question by Robert Bakker's "the Frog Problem" in relation to asteroid impacts. There have been numerous impacts on the planet over the millions of years that life has been here. The only time one has had anything to do with extinctions is the K-T boundary 65 mya at the end of the dinosaurs. What would happen? fire, tidal waves, acid rain, earthquakes, nuclear winter. Who would this affect the most? everyone, but mostly small animals. Who went extinct? all dinosaurs (but not birds, their descendents), marine reptiles, flying reptiles. Most evidence indicates that these animals were in some cases (some dinosaurs) on a decline before the impact, and some were doing fine. But the point is, that the number of species that goes extinct when one of these "Global Killers" (up to ten miles wide) hits the planet is not any more that when there is no impact. Conclusion: Bolide impacts are very noisy, and very loud and destructive localy, but A, they might not cause that much global damage and/or B, animals are much more resilient to these disasters than assumed.

Answer 4

This is not an exaggeration. The Shoemaker-Levy comet that broke up and hit Jupiter made an explosion larger than the earth that was visible with a telescope from Earth. And, yes there is evidence that not only did an asteroid wipe out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but it was also responsible for human evolution. This asteroid left physical evidence as did many others. The dinosaur killer hit near the East coast of Mexico and actually had a lot to do with the eventual shape of the Gulf of Mexico. 30 million years ago, another asteroid caused the Ice Age, which is supposed to have wiped out the Mastodon.

Answer 5

It's no exaggeration... if a large enough asteroid or meteor were to strike this planet the results would be devastating. Aside from the initial impact, depending on the location we would experience tidal waves as well as a blocking-out of the sun from high-altitude debris.
This is the supported theory of what happened to take out the dinosaurs.
The dynamics of the impact have to do more with the size and speed of the meteor rather than the mass of the object being hit. Picture someone throwing a baseball to you lightly... it strikes you and you're relatively undamaged. Now picture the same baseball hitting you at 25,000 miles per hour. You're not going to walk away from that impact.

Answer 6

No. The scientists are simply giving what the science is telling them, the fearmongers are the ones who exaggerate. As some one said, scientists base impact probablility and strength off two scales, the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, and the Palermo Impact Scale. Both determine our chances. If a one mile asteroid impacted the Earth (depending on velocity and composition), it would not be a global killer, however, it would cause massive regional destruction and throw enough ash, and soil into the atmo to block out the sun. Hence, our ability to produce crops would be inhibited (depending on the impacts location (lat. long.). So it wouldnt be a global killer directly but it could indirectly through crop failure and global war. However, if a 9 mile wide asteroid were to impact the Earth, then you have a global killer. It would flash boil millions if not trillions of gallons of water, or throw trillions of cubic tons of material into the atmo. If the impact doesnt kill, youd be killed by the resulting fire, or from the nuclear winter.

Answer 7

Actually a quarter-mile asteroid could wipe us out. The uncertainty lies in the probability of impact over a given time, not in the effects. Witness Meteor Crater in Arizona.
One big factor besides size is the composition of the object. If it is largely metallic - iron and nickel - it will not burn off much while passing through the atmosphere, so more energy will be available to lift dust into the air and create a multi-year winter. A stony object gets eroded by the atmospheric passage more successfully.
The fossil record does indicate mass extinctions contemporaneous with the "iridium layer" found to be world-wide and of extraterrestrial origin, i. e. from an asteroid.

Answer 8

Meteoroids are small products that clutter the photograph voltaic attitude. while one falls to earth and starts to expend interior the ambience, they're suggested as meteors. products that make landfall are suggested as meteorites. Meteorites are the main possibly to hit earth, and lots of do, regardless of if maximum are so very small they bypass ignored. those micro-meteorites is additionally spoke of almost everywhere. Comets and asteroids are comparable products, comets are asteroids that have a substantive tail. As for asteroid impacts, the difficulty right here is there is not any professional definition of what's an asteroid or a meteoroid. greater suitable merchandise hits the earth extraordinarily generally, regardless of if maximum explode interior our environment. the situation that shaped Barringer crater in Arizona replaced into as quickly as triggered via way of an merchandise that weighed 3 hundred,000 metric plenty falling around 500,000 years in the past(*a million). the situation that brought about the Tunguska experience has been defined as an asteroid and as a comet. it relatively is been expected that an merchandise considerable sufficient to reason an explosion the dimensions of the atomic explosion at Hiroshima happens on common as quickly as a 300 and sixty 5 days!, yet generally bypass left out (*2). Asteroid Apophis this is 320m great might come interior 18,3 hundred of Earth in 2029 (*3), yet NASA is continuously refining it relatively is orbit records, and the opportunities of it hitting are expected to be around a million in 4 million, no longer something to loose sleep over. :-)

Answer 9

On the planet, definitely no. She would hardly bulge under the impact. We, human, would definitely suffer under such an impact. A direct hit on a populated region or a much stronger tsunami on coasts of any ocean on the world followed by a winter induced by the induced dust from the impact or the fires would mean sudden deaths, then freezing for a lot of people and then starving for the survivors. The famous K/T meteor burned the half of the earth. We would suffer. The planet we are on would not.

Answer 10

There is a rain of space debrie. However the earth moves with the solar system at a high velocity and travels great distance in space so far we have not collided with any major large mass structures.:However Jupiter did.
So the earth is not neccessarily immune to major collision.
It would be castrastophic if the earth was to split in two.